The most helpful favourable review

The most helpful critical review

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4.0 out of 5 starsThe Culture crossed with the Roman Empire
Ancilliary Justice starts with its central character, who goes by the alias of Breq, on a wintery planet in search of a weapon with which she hopes to revenge events from 20 years previously. The story of those events is told in alternate chapters where we learn about a universe which is home to the imperial Radch, whose artificially intelligent starships control networks...

3.0 out of 5 starsIntriguing and unusual
Breq is unique but she wasn't always. Once Breq was a spaceship, Justice of Toren, comprising thousands of corpse soldiers, each with a shared identity, one of many such vessels spreading the influence of the Imperial Radch around the Galaxy. Breq is now alone, her vessel destroyed, and she has only one goal - to take vengeance on Anaander Mianaai, the lord of the Radch,...

Ancilliary Justice starts with its central character, who goes by the alias of Breq, on a wintery planet in search of a weapon with which she hopes to revenge events from 20 years previously. The story of those events is told in alternate chapters where we learn about a universe which is home to the imperial Radch, whose artificially intelligent starships control networks of telepathic soldiers, created from the bodies of those unfortunate enough to have been conquered and killed by these interstellar Romans.

Breq, it turns out, is one such avatar, One Esk Nineteen, last survivor of the troop carrier Justice of Toren. That sentence is indicative of two of the key features of author Ann Leckie's book. Firstly, that the ships control multiple avatars, all of whom are aware of what each other is/are thinking and seeing. Leckie handles the description of multiple viewpoints and rapidly changing perspective really skilfully. Secondly, this is very much a story of confused identity, as One Esk struggles to understand who and what she is. Crucially for the plot she and her like are not the only multiple entities in the book...... While the confusion created is intentional, it does occasionally step a little too far as, early on, Leckie rapidly introduces races, nations, factions characters, and interchangeable avatars at a pace which left this reader at least, somewhat disorientated.

As well as effectively describing the experiences of the multiple entities, Leckie gives the isolated One Esk a convincing, dispassionate voice, viewing the worlds around her in an unemotional, detached manner. While reading the book, one term which didn't enter my head was 'zombie', but in retrospect, that would be one way of looking at it. If all zombie stories are really about something else, Ancilliary Justice is a zombie story about identity and about what it really means to be human. Here it is One Esk, who, despite her origins, turns out to be the most human character.

In using SF to consider issues of humanity, Leckie joins a long tradition in which, of course, Philip K Dick is the dominant figure. He is not her only speculative literary antecedent. Early on, with its dominant society and intelligent spaceships, it felt a bit like reading about the Culture's dark, imperialist cousin, but by the end, with a seemingly impregnable empire, weakened by internal corruption, and faced with mysterious and faintly sinister aliens, it is closer to Stephen Donaldson's Gap series.

One interesting feature, which echoes both Iain M Banks and Ursula K Le Guin, is the ambiguous and shifting sexuality of the characters. This is society where language is subtly nuanced to express gender but where actual sexual identity seems difficult to determine. The default pronoun is female, but individuals are referred to as both him and her depending on circumstances. This usage gives the impression of a universe dominated by women, which asks questions of the extent to which language echoes, and/or reinforces the balance of power in society. If Leckie is saying anything about the effect of the dominant gender on society, it seems to be that it is of little impact. This is a society every bit as violent and competitive as a male-dominated one.

Finally, I loved the end. I didn't enter into this book in the knowledge that it is intended to be the first in a series, but it is, and that results in a culmination which is like a door being slammed in one's face, and a feeling of "Wow, what next".

In terms of sub genre this is closest to military SF, but it is definitely towards the intelligent end of the spectrum, a long way from ultra-violent, video game inspired, shoot-em-ups, and run of the mill Napoleonic-navy-in-space stories which seem to predominate these days.

This is not a piece of planet-shatteringly original writing, its influences are too obvious for that, but it is a step above the average, and as such, well worth reading.

If you're a fan of things like Ian M. Banks, you'll enjoy this one. With sentient starships and their humanoid avatars, this story takes a thought-provoking look into what makes a person, in both a figurative and disturbingly literal sense. One of those books I just couldn't put down, I blasted through this one in a weekend. Wholeheartedly recommended!

Breq is unique but she wasn't always. Once Breq was a spaceship, Justice of Toren, comprising thousands of corpse soldiers, each with a shared identity, one of many such vessels spreading the influence of the Imperial Radch around the Galaxy. Breq is now alone, her vessel destroyed, and she has only one goal - to take vengeance on Anaander Mianaai, the lord of the Radch, who exists in an almost infinite number of forms. Breq is also our narrator and it is through these strange eyes, this unusual perspective, that we witness the events that brought Breq to her single-minded purpose.

Ancillary Justice is an unusual novel, reflecting the nature of its narrator. Breq has lived in one form or another for thousands of years but in many ways she is socially naive. This expresses itself in her language. She can communicate with most races but not necessarily correctly. She doesn't readily know gender pronouns; everyone is `she' unless Breq is corrected. This has the rather peculiar result that we are not sure whether we are being introduced to men or women and, as we work this out, there are surprises. However, for me, this reinforced how little gender can matter when a story's narrator has far more basic identity problems to solve. While this use of the `she' pronoun has been an issue for some readers, it mattered little to me and I enjoyed the rare excuses for humour that it provided to the novel.

The novel opens on an icy planet with a moment of inexplicable mercy by Breq. She finds Seivarden lying in the snow, close to death. Seivarden had once been one of Breq's human crew members, many hundreds of years before, and there is no reason for her to be there, let alone still alive. Despite having no feelings of warmth for Seivarden, Breq picks her up and together they continue Breq's hunt for vengeance. The story then moves back and forth over a 19-year period, the years that saw Justice of Toren destroyed and the Radch divided.

Above all else, Ancillary Justice is a novel about identity and justice, set against the background of the Radch which conquers worlds by `annexation', a sanitised word for an inhuman process that leaves most people dead or emptied of life, becoming these corpse soldiers who police the empire. We witness the process of annexation on one planet through Breq's prejudiced understanding - there are acts of terror - but Breq is in the process of becoming one and with that comes other emotions, including loyalty, affection, heroism, selflessness. Not that Breq would necessarily recognise these qualities in herself. But it isn't just Breq who changes - Seivarden, too, alters over the novel and her journey is, for me, the most memorable and warming aspect of the novel. There are also events that strike out of the blue, shocking the reader as well as Breq.

There has been a lot of excitement about Ancillary Justice and so I was very keen to read it. It is undoubtedly an ambitious and original debut SF novel by Anne Leckie. It is also, I believe, the start of a new Imperial Radch series, although it stands alone very well. I liked the characters a great deal, I felt for them in this cruel world they had become part of and I was very intrigued by Anaander Mianaai - a split personality taken to extremes. However, the pace and story left me disengaged. Its sudden movements backwards and forwards disconnected me from events and at times I found it hard going. I was glad I persevered as I enjoyed the second half much more than the first but the style is not one to suit every reader, including this one.

I finished this book and did something I haven't done for years: I started over at the beginning. Several weeks later, I'm still thinking about it.

Leckie knows exactly what she is doing with her ideas and uses them to enrich the structure of the prose as well as the story. Particularly interesting is the AI's split identity, which leads to some beautiful city-wide scenes handled with technical mastery. However, it's the characters that drove me to the second readthrough. Leckie vividly paints the central cast through the PoV of the central character, Esk, a strong and matter-of-fact voice with glaring emotional holes that become slowly obvious through her actions and through what she does not report. The settings are vibrant, the emotional arcs are like a punch to the gut, and the structure so well done that I kept intending to do chores but was unable to put the book down after the end of each chapter.

The only indication this is a first novel is a couple of pacing hiccups in the climax, but for me that would merely have knocked this book down from six stars. I have no hesitation in giving it five. Even though the story was satisfying on its own I am eagerly awaiting a sequel.

In the far-future Breq arrives on an icy planet in a quest for revenge that’s been 20 years in the making. Breq’s the only survivor of the Justice of Toren, a giant space ship used by the Radch Empire to extend and consolidate its territories but Breq was more than this one body - s/he was the artificial intelligence that controlled it, effectively downloading itself into corpse soldiers (drones created from the Empire’s prisoners) so that it could participate in operations. But an act of treachery from someone Breq never expected resulted in the ship’s destruction and leaving Breq with this one last remaining body.

Breq’s quest however is hindered when s/he reluctantly saves the life of Seivarden Vendaai, a former officer of hers who went missing hundreds of years earlier and was presumed dead. Keen to hide his/her identity, Breq wants to ditch the drug-addicted Seivarden at the earliest opportunity, but Seivarden isn’t keen to go and the two soon find themselves caught within a plot that threatens the future of the Radch Empire.

Ann Leckie’s critically acclaimed debut SF novel has won the Arthur C Clarke Award and a Hugo (to name but two). It’s a technically accomplished, intelligent piece of writing that mixes genders for its protagonists (something I particularly liked) and I really admired how Leckie handles the POV shifts as Breq pilots different bodies in different locations. I also enjoyed the detail given on the Radch Empire, how it operates and how it came into being – there’s a lot of attention to detail here and it’s cleverly put together. However, the revenge plot is very thin and the central twist was familiar to me (but only because I have previously read A FACE LIKE GLASS by Frances Hardinge, which uses a similar device). I also found Breq and Seivarden difficult to engage with, Breq because s/he is largely emotionless and Seivarden because s/he’s so self-absorbed. Also, the conclusion to the book just wasn’t high enough stakes for me and felt slightly anti-climatic. Ultimately, I think this is one of those books that I didn’t get along with – not because it’s a bad book but because it didn’t appeal to me. As such, I’m not going to rush to read the sequel but if you’re looking for an intelligent piece of well-written SF, then you should definitely check it out.

Perhaps this will disappoint, but Ancillary Justice frustrated me. It’s a very, very good book, and definitely one of the best science-fiction books of 2014. No question of that – I very much enjoyed it. The themes which run though it are starkly human – vengeance, love, redemption, recovery – drive many great books. The concepts which underpin the setting are fresh, imaginative, clever and richly themed. The setting itself, intricate and powerful, hints at huge scope and an operatic scale for the stories to be told within, and at times the level of detail is enthralling (most often in the context of the military’s structure). The lead character, Breq (or Justice of Toren One Esk 19 as she is much later on), is an ancillary which, in itself, is an intriguing take on POV (although not necessarily completely original). Ancillaries themselves are a stark, ingenious way to characterise the Radch, and to underpin the way in which the story develops. The attempt at a single gender pronoun, at least in part to add colour to the way in which the Radch culture differs so much from our own, was both brave and clever. Reports suggest Leckie refused to change that when asked.

Yet, to me, Ancillary Justice fails to deliver on the promise of a truly great novel. The setting, which that detail hints at, is never fully rendered. There are times when I found it difficult to visualise the places her story unfolded in – they were so often sketched, skirted over, rather than colourfully painted (perhaps Breq for obvious reasons just doesn’t appreciate the details). The story seemed to take a seat behind Leckie’s literary style, and sometimes the pace flagged, especially in the early stages.

Breq as a lead character was always going to be tricky and I was never convinced by the reasons for her driving desire to take on the Lord of the Radch. Moving from her POV as Justice of Toren, and then as the various ancillaries which are commanded by Justice of Toren, is actually seamless. I never experienced a difficulty in picking that up and the concept is something special. Yet, from a pure ‘character/desire’ perspective, I found her relationship with the character who is the catalyst for the driving force of the story itself not deep enough to spark that desire. We know only that the character concerned was one of her ‘favourites’. That character herself, the reason Breq takes on the mission she does, does not exhibit the sort of emotional attachment to the place she is stationed that we would expect, given how events unfold later (and the way the Radchaai are as a society). The way Breq sees it, tapped into the emotions of that character as she is, the character is almost detached and apathetic towards the whole place.

The gender pronoun issue, trumpeted as one of the really insightful aspects of the novel, with comparisons made to Ursula Le Guin, frequently had the effect of dropping me out of the story. Some characters are clearly male, some clearly female, but we are not told about all of them. Why are we told about any of them? If gender is removed as a focal point for characterisation, thus collapsing our assumptions and giving us a clean slate for desires and driving forces, why tell us about any at all? It leaves us wanting to search out the prose to see if we’ve missing key point based on gender. If one character has a physical relationship with another, fine. We still don’t need to know gender.

Story, yes, the most important part – this is the first book in a trilogy, so the story is set to unfold, but it the fulcrum of Breq’s self-imposed mission feels like it is missing so much. There’s a twenty-year gap between the events on Ors and the events which take place with Seivarden. We have the vaguest hints at what Breq does in those years, but not enough to justify her drive over that time and set it out. Also, I found it hard to identify with Breq – although she displays very human desires (perhaps her old self re-asserting itself in her subconscious), her internalised thoughts are often quite bland – I found myself fighting to root for her. I don’t agree with some reviews suggestive of deus ex machina, but I do feel a mite confused by Seivarden – that his (yes, it’s a he) place in the book seems a little convenient. In some ways, it’s a classic B-story which arcs around behind the A-story and intersects at the critical moment, but Seivarden has so little to do that it doesn’t even really fulfil the category of B-story. It’s almost as if he was there to (a) explain the gender pronoun thing a little better, and (b) for Breq to “save the cat” and give us something to root for. Seivarden seems too ambiguous and empty a character to justify Breq’s actions later on.

Pace is slow the begin with – far too slow and there is too much insightful dialogue in relation to the action which actually moves the plot forward. This is what I mean by Leckie’s literary style. There were palpable lapses in tension in the early stages of the book, although plenty of what could be said to be, still underplayed, conflict (between Awn and the various factions on Ors, as well as between the factions themselves).

All this said, Ancillary Justice demonstrates an author who is likely to write something truly great, with a prodigious imagination, and is well-worth reading – there are certainly few books released in 2014 which stand up to the scope, imagination and operatic scale of Ancillary Justice.

The writing style is clunky to begin with. As the main character develops and the story unfolds her writing become much easier to read. This I assume was a deliberate and brave move. I put it down for a couple of day as found the start hard going before going back to it. I am pleased that I gave it a chance and would recommend that other do so . I think they will be glad in the end. Not a classic but a very good and though provoking read.

Science fiction by it's very nature has many different concepts ideas and thoughts. After all when you have the universe at your keyboard why not? However much of it is derivative and repetitive. That's why I tend to read it in waves, because I'll OD on it and then lose interest for a while and then read other genres.

When I downloaded this I was just about at that stage. Probably if I had bought another sci-fi book I wouldn't have read it all the way through before I lost interest. However, Ann Leckie has done something special here. She has written a unique book in a tough genre to do that.

The four stars I gave this is possibly a little unfair when most of the book is a five star effort. This was for the start which was a little tough going as it deliberately left things confusing and hard to pick up. Even after reading the whole book I never really understood the sex of some of the characters. This is because it's written from the point of view of an ancillary to a destroyed space ship Justice of Toren who has no concept of the different types of humans. Everyone is 'she' and that means you have to think hard about the context.

Essentially the story is about the fracturing of an all seeing all knowing quasi-religious overseer who rules an empire of humans called Radchaai. It's an internal struggle where one part of the collective conscious is fighting the other part when both sides know what the other is thinking. It's mental chess. The ancillary of Justice of Toren, Breq, is after some revenge against losing itself because of the internal fight.

Once I fought my way past the first part of the book during which I almost put it aside I realised I was reading a book of rare excellence. Clever, well thought out, full of novel concepts and perhaps a bit of a dig at religion.

Very satisfying ending too.

Overall a book well worth a read if you want something refreshing and different.

This is the only book that have received the five highest Sf awards ever. Of course one would think that this would then be the best Sf book ever written? Or at least a true competitor to get on the ten best ever written list? Unfortunately, that is not the case. Let me tell you why.

This is a well written book. The Author has created a universe and filled it with a lot of interesting people and a culture that is very different from ours. Ann Leckie is a good writer and reading the book it is obvious that she has a future in this field. Since it is a Sf book it is filled with some new ideas combined with classical Sf components. It works to some extent and it could have been worth a higher rating if it had not broken one of the most important qualifications for a superior book.

Unfortunately "Ancillary Justice" is quite dull. Nothing much happens and even if the text tries to convince you that a huge mega historical event is going on, there is very little in the story to support that. Most of the story is dialogue between various people and an inner dialogue in the head of our main "hero".

Ann Leckie has also chosen to structure the book so that every second chapter takes place 20 years before the main story. This method works sometimes and in other cases it does not. In this book it breaks up whatever small momentum you have in the story and slows it down.

One odd thing is that we do not know if we are dealing with humans or not. There are true aliens mentioned in the text but we do not meet them. But what we meet are only women. There is not a single man in the book as far as I can tell. They also have sex with each other. Of course since this is a Sf book you can have a universe populated and run by only women but it leaves so many questions hanging (like where does the children come from?) that after some time you start to wonder why she did not add a few lines to explain it all. BTW, even odder is that people have a problem recognizing if a person is a male or female. How is that possible if there are no males around?

But the basic story of a universe run by a powerful empire and the power struggle within that works. This is supposed to be a trilogy and the second book, "Ancillary Sword", is already published. I will read it but feel no rush. This is not one of the best Sf books ever but interesting enough.